


Sticky

by Obotligtnyfiken



Series: Chickens coming home to roost [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Clubbing, Dancing, Ficlet, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Reichenbach, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unsafe Sex, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 11:49:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12275874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Obotligtnyfiken/pseuds/Obotligtnyfiken
Summary: John finds it difficult to cope with the memories of Sherlock after The Fall. Seeking release from the nightmares and the intruding memories, he ends up in a routine of alcohol, violence, dancing and sex. Is tonight the night when he will break the cycle?I've tagged it Sherlock/John, but Sherlock doesn't actually appear in this story.





	Sticky

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet takes place during Sherlock’s time away after The Reichenbach Fall, between season two and three of BBC’s Sherlock. 
> 
> It is inspired by the prompt “Drugs and addiction” + origins and/or causality that I got from multivariate-madness at Tumblr. Thank you for the inspiration! I’d get nowhere without prompts.
> 
> The prompt is based on one of my “Moffat’s chickens”: twelve ideas from the hiatus about what Steven Moffat could have meant when he said in an interview that chickens were coming home to roost in s4. Link for Moffat's Chickens: https://obotligtnyfiken.tumblr.com/post/138370350688/master-post-for-moffats-chickens
> 
> As usual, I owe Wetislandinthenorthatlantic thanks for getting me off the ground and keeping me on it.
> 
> I do not own these characters. This work is for entertainment purposes only.

John felt his knees shake a bit as he walked down the stairs in the near dark. The heavy steel door behind him closed with a bang, pushing a gust of the cold winter air down his neck and shutting out the roars and chatter from the line waiting to get in. Above him, the spotty young kid in the coat check fiddled with his phone, bored to death with his job. Below him, the heavy bass of generic dance music vibrated through the door at the bottom of the stairs.

Was he really going to do this again? His head was still pounding from last night, even if it was more from the uppercut that had shook his teeth into his skull than from the alcohol. He liked to tell himself that, anyway.

The question was useless. He knew he was going to continue down these sticky stairs, open that door and enter the humid frenzy of the club.  At least he wasn't looking for trouble tonight. Well, not that kind of trouble anyway.

His nights were starting to form a sort of routine, if such a word could be used for whatever it was that he was doing. One night drinking in a pub with Greg, with modest amounts of alcohol. Not enough to make Greg worried, but enough to get him to sleep without thinking about Sherlock once he got home. He usually dreamed of trying to catch things falling, but he did that most nights anyway.

The next night, the normalcy of pub nights with Greg and ear infections at the surgery would be itching his skin like a rash. He would go for a long walk around London, looking for petty thieves that needed stopping or fights to break up. He always did that the night after he had met with Greg, so that whatever bruises and nicks he got would have faded as much as possible until he saw him next. Those nights usually ended with him stumbling into a bar seedy enough for no one to be bothered by his roughed up appearance, quickly downing a beer and a few shots before going back to his dull little flat. When he got home, he would be full of exhilarating, sparkling energy that wanted out. It usually ended with a disappointing wank in the shower, though, as he washed off the grime and the blood from fighting the London underworld for a few hours. He’d sleep badly, too wired up to relax but too tired to do anything but stare at the dark.

That was why the next night was club night, as long as his face wasn't too badly rearranged. London had a long line of downstairs clubs with sticky stairways where he could pick up someone to get the energy out of his system. In the beginning, he had tried to stick to girls, but it was difficult to find women who were rough enough, especially since he was only ever looking for one night stands. After a few weeks, he had thrown caution to the wind and decided to pick up all the habits from his clubbing days in med school. Finding a bloke wasn’t hard if he worked a bit at it, especially since he was consciously looking for the dangerous ones, the ones that the regulars were giving a wide berth.

Dancing, drinking and having various forms of sex in toilets, alleys and sometimes other people’s grimy flats, usually left him exhausted enough to sleep through the night. There was hell to pay the next day, though. Thankfully, his colleagues were still giving him a lot of leeway, thinking he needed time to recover from his traumatic experience. He felt a bit guilty about playing up the horror of seeing his best friend falling from the rooftop of St Bart’s. It had been bloody, but the images that kept haunting him wasn’t of Sherlock dead on the pavement like he had told his boss, even if those showed up often enough in his dreams. What he kept seeing when he closed his eyes was Sherlock looking him in the eye, towering above him, coming in too close until they were breathing the same air. Sherlock would be focusing all his magnificent mental capacities on John so that for a moment, it would feel like they were melting into one. And then the image shattered. He hadn’t told his colleagues that. He didn’t think they would understand. It was better if they thought that it was visions of his friend’s cracked skull that made him miss work a bit too often.

So the fourth night, he would force himself to stay at home. He tried to get through the evening without too much whisky. If he had managed to stay awake all day, he was usually able to go to sleep on just a little night cap.

The fifth day, he would either wake up even more exhausted after a night of bad dreams, or he would wake up refreshed, which was worse. Because then the guilt would set in. He’d feel guilty about the alcohol, about the illegal policing, about the men he’d punch and kick, about the rough, sometimes unprotected sex in public places, about the lies he told.

But most of all, he felt guilty about dragging his memories of Sherlock into this muck. The man had been -- well, not pure, of course. A person who left rotting thumbs in the kitchen could not be called pure. But there had been something innocent about him, and even if he had been well versed in the criminality of London, he had certainly been an innocent when it came to sex, whether or not he was a virgin, like his brother and Moriarty insinuated. How could he even think of Sherlock in those clubs and alleys? And in private, in the shower and in his bed. That was probably the worst part. Thinking about that was what drove John to walk the streets of London again. Not looking for crime this time, but wandering aimlessly along streets and river banks, but somehow still ending up in places where he and Sherlock had solved one crime or other.

The walking did him good. It was probably the only healthy thing in his life right now, especially if he stuck to cafés instead of pubs along the way. He tried to keep that up for as long as he could, walking during his lunch break and after work. Then Greg would call and the cycle would start all over again.  

John stepped on a piece of gum that someone had spit out on the stairs. It was still gooey and whoever had left it there was probably sweating behind the door downstairs right now. He scraped his right shoe against the edge of a step, managing to get most of it off.

As he kept walking down, the soles of his shoes stuck to the surface of the stairs, the right one more than the left because of the gum. They made a disgusting, squeaky noise. Generations of beer, dirt and even less savoury substances were layered on the dark wood, as if the stairway had never been cleaned.

John could remember sitting on stairs like this in his teens, trying to smoke to look cool or trying to get his hand under some girl’s shirt or into her knickers. Always trying. Trying to be like Dad, make him proud. Trying desperately not to become Dad, the angry drunk. Trying to find a tiny bit of space for himself between his sister’s acting out, his mother’s crying manipulations and his father’s drunken back hand. That space had usually ended up being some stupid and dangerous prank that he let some mate talk him into, which led to more crying, more beatings, and more acting out when Harry decided that her brother had received enough attention for one night.

With every step he took, his shoes felt stickier, as if his past was glueing itself back on him, grabbing hold of his shoes to follow him home. He was going to have to dance hard tonight, wear those memories right off and leave them on the dance floor. That’s what dancing was for.

If he was honest with himself, he knew that he was spiralling out of control. The hangovers tasted like his father’s breath on Monday morning and like his sister's sobs on his shoulder after yet another break up. And his longing for alcohol when sober hadn't been this strong since that time in med school when he was almost thrown out. Back then, he had been pushed back to sobriety by the fear of having to go home to his parents and tell them that he had failed. And he had had the rugby team for distraction and stress release. Now, there was no one to report to and no one waiting back home -- no. Stop. No Sherlock. He wasn’t going to think about Sherlock.

He was going to manage it tonight. This was going to be his first step towards moving on, rounding that corner that Ella kept talking about. He was going to open that door, step onto that dance floor and hook up with someone who didn’t look at all like Sherlock. And he was going to kiss him, and grind against him to the rhythm of the beat, and stick his finger into his belt loop, pull him close and breathe into his ear that they should get off the dance floor. And he wasn’t going to think about Sherlock once while he was doing it.

John reached the bottom of the stairs and put his hand on the thudding door. It vibrated with the beat from the music, making John’s bones tingle. He pushed the door open, and stepped into the booming wall of sound, completely certain that he would fail to live up to any expectations he might have of himself.

Pushing against wet shirts and gyrating jeans, John squeezed himself into the middle of the dance floor. There, in the heart of the pulsating mass of human flesh, he closed his eyes and let the music take him away. In the bubble of deafening music, he was once again running the streets of London, shooting cabbies and hounds, fighting for Sherlock’s life in any way possible. He was lost. He was happy.

The music changed to a slower beat and John found himself panting. He opened his eyes to look for the bar, thinking he could do with a drink. As he turned, his whole world was filled by a tight, aubergine shirt. He looked up, right into a pair of pale blue eyes under a dark fringe. Straight, not curly, but long and flouncing the same way Sherlock’s used to. It felt for a moment as if John’s heart would stop and never start again. The stranger smirked and slid a large hand behind John’s back in a half embrace to stop him from falling backwards.

“Whoa, there,” the man shouted, almost making himself heard over the din.

The two of them started swaying in time with the music, their clothes brushing against each other but their bodies only touching where the man's fingertips were pressing through the thin cotton of John’s shirt. John tried to look away, but felt caught, like a deer in the headlights. There was a frisson of fear at the back of John’s neck at the predatory look in the man’s eyes and it soon spread throughout his body, making him feel hot and cold in turns. At this precise moment, nothing else existed but the music, their two bodies and the adrenaline pumping in John’s veins.

The beat of the music picked up and John put his arms around the man’s neck, pushing closer until their bodies were flush against each other. “Dance with me, Sherlock,” he whispered and gave himself up to the inevitable.


End file.
